Monsoon Season Arrives In Myanmar

While the international community is busy trying to get the junta to live up to the promises that aid workers can enter country and help with the estimated 2.5 million people in need of assistance following the Cyclone early this month, the situation on the ground continues to deteriorate. While aid is getting in through relief flights and a few ships, the response is often described as slow and inadequate. Most aid agencies report problems caused by the government, and the estimated dead and missing is at 133,000+. Government problems continue to dominate the headlines.

Development Program's director for crisis prevention, said Monday that despite the government's statements that most of the short-term relief has been completed, "no one" at the U.N. or on her team "feels that we are anywhere near the end of the humanitarian relief period."

Ms. Cravero, who was in Yangon, Myanmar's main city, for a donor conference Sunday, said only 50% of the affected people have been provided with significant aid and that foreign governments at the meeting stressed they would only offer more support when they see more access and transparency in aid distribution.

There is cautious optimism following the UN brokered diplomatic deal that would allow aid workers, which will supposedly allow workers into country by the end of this week. While the UN is putting the happy face on these developments, we don't expect it to happen quickly. While the government does nothing, conditions on the ground will get much worse this week as the monsoon season we discussed immediately following the Cyclone tragedy arrives in Myanmar.

The monsoon has struck and it is raining all day, every day and will continue like this until October; with high winds and heavy rainfall. They will not see the sun for the next five to six months.

These people have no shelter at all; they have no dry clothes. The young, the weak and the old are particularly vulnerable. People are so demoralised that they have lost interest in taking on any activity, unusual for such industrious people.

Imagine if you had spent the last two weeks soaking wet and up to your knees in water, nothing to eat or drink, with your family dying all around you, your livelihood gone, your home blown away, weakened with dysentery and influenza.

While there have been a number of western media editorials calling for confrontation and intervention, the aid agencies are calling for a different approach. Many aid agencies find the local Burmese institutions to be quite capable, and more important, trusted by the local population unlike external support which has been made unpopular through decades of propaganda. This is a view from a western aid worker perspective inside Myanmar that is outside the usual western press reporting.

Contrary to press reports, a good deal of aid is getting through. The big US cargo planes are still being prevented from landing, but the organisations we are working with all have their own channels. Commercial air freight into the country is working normally and a good deal of aid supply is coming through this way.

Most necessities are available here - there is a ready supply of freight from China, India and Thailand - and yet cyclone survivors are being given bottles of mineral water flown in from the UK when local companies are offering excellent products.

Supplies can be sourced here easily and far more cheaply than flying them in. This is mainland south-east Asia - Burma is surrounded by mass-producing, low-cost, tiger economies. This is not “darkest Africa”.

Village people here are mistrustful of foreign medicines and would prefer Burmese traditional medicines. And they find the high-energy biscuits being doled out by the aid agencies unpalatable and demoralising. Traditional staples such as rice and fish paste are both readily available just outside the disaster zone - indeed, last week, at the Thilawa docks, the government was loading ships with rice for export to Bangladesh. There is no shortage of rice.

There is no need to fly food in, just money, which is lighter, to buy simple essentials.

While the military regime may be incompetent to deal with the crisis, we should not under-estimate the resourcefulness of other Burmese institutions. Local firms, associations, clubs and schools have been collecting funds and goods to send to the needy. Their biggest problem is they can not deliver beyond the distance of a day trip, about 90 miles.

With so many political issues going on, the NGOs have had to learn how things work - you need a Burmese front organisation and the NGO takes the back seat. This is now working - and timely, as a continued local-only response would be impossible to sustain in the long term.

The article goes on to note that the western criticism is hurting the effort. We are not impressed by this argument, we do not see the wisdom in the international community standing quiet while the lives of millions of people hang in the balance, and find the logic of such a stance to be empty given the response by the junta to all conditions, positive or negative.

When two and a half million people face five months of rain with no shelter, and the international community is prohibited from helping these people, it is somewhat telling that the NGOs see the best option being to stand by and allow for small gains. Very understandable though, no government or institution has been willing to take any substantial action towards offering a better alternative.

As the monsoon season rains on the people in Myanmar over the next week, the real danger becomes the expected increase in mosquitoes. With a lack of shelter, an abundance of rotting animal and human corpses, conditions for a perfect storm for disease appears a certainty without rapid action... something that has been absent the entire effort.

While there may be food right now, we note that the rice crop did not get laid down prior to the monsoon seasons arrival, meaning the nation is facing a 40% drop is in the rice crop from the beginning. The UN is right to look at this as a long term problem, because meeting the short term problems of finding shelter for millions of people is only the beginning, the lack of a rice crop in the region this year and the destruction of most regional fishing industries leaves the local communities with long term needs as well.